Cisco Firepower 4100 Series vs. GFI KerioControl

When we are asked by local partners which security equipment we use we always recommend our Cisco security products. The Firepower firewall is no exception and we can easily recommend this to others who need a fast, secure, and well built system that integrates well with all your existing hardware and software.

Incentivized

IT works very well in the non-profit and small business space when there is a need for remote access or connecting several sites in a point to point VPN, user management and rule creation are very easy. The use of the MyKerio website for remote management also makes it easy to troubleshoot problems and make changes if technical staff are not onsite.

Incentivized

• VPN Site to Site
• High Availability / Failover
• Ldap mapping to vpn connections

Incentivized

• VPN for Remote Employees
• Point to point VPNs
• Scanning of traffic
• Ease of management
• Website filtering by both sites and key words

Incentivized

• The failover process is clunky. When out Fortigate firewalls failed over, we lost 1 ping. When our Firepowers failover, whether it is on purpose or not, we experience a 2.5 minute complete outage.
• Cisco could stand to improve their support documentation. I have found it difficult to find good directions for configuring these, especially when it comes to NAT and IPSEC tunnels.

• Support can take longer to respond that it should
• Could work better with resellers
• Spend more effort on adding new features

Incentivized

In general, the Cisco Firepower 4100 Series works well, great performance, support a high volume of traffic, configuration, users, the device is powerful and once you have something configured you can be sure that it will rarely fail but for day to day troubleshooting or modifications needed can be a little complicated due to you have to deploy every change you make in the device and is not as fast as other devices, in general a deploy takes 5 minutes.

Incentivized

Very easy to use and manage, user training takes less then 10 minutes. Technicians can perform basic tasks with less then an hour of training and can master it in under a year.

Incentivized

Support is very slow to respond and it takes a long time to convince level 1 techs that you need to be moved up to someone more senior. I believe support is outsourced and they are graded on how few tickets they need to escalate to higher tiers so they will try to figure out a solution even if it is detrimental to the overall support experience.

Incentivized

Cisco Firepower 4100 Series deployment is straightforward and easy to implement. It is also can support high availability and able to achieve redundancy. Besides, firmware upgrade is quite simple and the process does not take much effort as the upgrade will be automatically done by itself. Cisco Firepower 4100 Series is also very cost effective compared with other similar ranges of firewalls.

We found Kerio Control to provide the most features and easiest management of all the solutions we looked at, while cost was not the lowest the value was by far the best when you considered all the factors, costs, and manhours involved in deployment and management.

Incentivized

• Positive impact would be our increased security network wide.
• Another positive would be the increased processing power, saving us time and [from] needing more equipment.
• A negative impact would be the increased need for having to learn a new interface.

Incentivized

• Easy to use makes it easy to train, reducing employee time and IT staff costs.
• Statefull inspection and web filtering greatly reduce malware incursions.
• Fact it can run on standard PC hardware greatly reduces cost to implement and makes scaling much less expensive.

Incentivized